CRITICAL & VISUAL STUDIES

Our Program of Study: Revised Curriculum Beginning Fall 2014!

Our Program of Study: Curriculum

Beginning Fall 2014

Pratt Institute Admissions http://www.pratt.edu/admissions/

Critical and Visual Studies is a Bachelor of Arts program for curious and imaginative students who want to pursue uniquely individualized studies in the liberal arts and sciences while immersed in Pratt’s environment of creative openness and intellectual experimentation.

Anchored in the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies, our program features an innovative curriculum that provides a broad foundation in the classic and contemporary works of the social sciences, philosophy, history, critical theory, and visual studies. Students choose from a generous selection of electives and concentrations from within the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and across the Institute in architecture, art history, art and design, and planning. In the third and Senior years, students enjoy a variety of electives while focusing on their concentrations, Minors, and Senior Thesis projects.

At the core of the program is the understanding that the integration of theory, method, and experience is crucial to learning and this brings vitality, creativity, and practical application to intellectual practice. Our students and faculty are interested in every aspect of social life—from street art to political systems, from international media to the global economy. Critical and Visual Studies provides an unique interdisciplinary framework within which our students explore the social, political, and artistic meanings of cultural and aesthetic production.

First Level: The first two years of the curriculum will give our students a broad and solid foundation in the Liberal Arts and Sciences, as well as allowing you to begin exploring your own individual interests.

Semester I
The first semester immerses our students into the foundations of the Liberal Arts: critical analysis, history, philosophy, science, and literature. Students share a common experience in the first semester that will establish a unique basis for your studies:

CST.100 First Year Seminar - 3.0 credits
CH.300 World History I - 3.0 credits
PHIL.208 or PHIL.209 History of Philosophy - 3.0 credits
ENGL.101 Introduction to Literary and Critical Studies I - 3.0 credits
MSCI.210 Science and Society - 3.0 credits
CST.190 Beyond Google I: Basic Information Literacy - 1.0 credit
Total Credits 16.0

Semester II
Semester Two completes the introduction to history, critical studies, literature and writing. It allows students the flexibility to choose electives from across the department, the school, and the institute. To ensure a distribution of elective credits, in semesters 2, 3, and 4 students may take no more than 6 non-required credits in any one disciplinary field of Social Science, History, Philosophy, and, Math and Science and no more than 15 credits from any single division at Pratt (i.e. SLAS, Art & Design, and Architecture).

ENGL.103 Introduction to Literary and Critical Studies II - 3.0 credits
CH.400 World History II - 3.0 credits
Open Elective credits 9.0 - 3.0 credits
Total Credits - 15.0

Semester III
In Semester Three, students take the new Symposium course and continue their distribution of electives.
SS.225 Symposium - 3.0 credits
Open Elective - 12.0 credits
Total Credits - 15.0

Semester IV
In semester 4, students participate in the guided advisement of Moderation. They also take their required Theory and Practice course and continue to take electives. “Moderation” provides students with the opportunity to reflect on their studies during semesters 1-3, identify their interests and begin to focus on the concentration that will structure the final two years of their program. Moderation requires students to examine their initial experiences in the program, their goals, and their interests, to evaluate their performance and their commitment to a course of study and to chart their final two years of college with the help of a faculty committee.

Theory and Practice requirement - 3.0
SS.299 Moderation - 2.0
Open Elective credits - 9.0
Total Credits - 14.0

First Level (Years 1 and 2) Total Course Credits: 60

Second Level: In their third and senior years, students are immersed in their guided electives, minors, internships, and their senior project or honors thesis. The project or thesis is undertaken with a committee chosen from and approved by the faculty. With the help of their Moderation advisers, students develop a course of study tailored to their individual interests and faculty expertise.

Semester V
CST.390 Beyond Google II: Thesis and Information Research - 1.0 credit
Guided elective - 9.0 credits
Open elective - 6.0 credits
Total Credits - 16.0

Semester VI
Guided electives - 9.0 credits
Open electives - 6.0 credits
Total Credits - 15.0

Semester VII
Guided elective - 3.0 credits
Open electives - 9.0 credits
CST.440 Senior Seminar - 3.0 credits
Total Credits - 15.0

Semester VIII
You may choice two options, either a 6 credit Senior Thesis or a 3 credit Senior Thesis
CST.480 Thesis/Senior Project* - 3.0 credits
Open Electives - 12.0 credits
OR
CST.480 Thesis/Senior Project* - 6.0 credits
Open Electives - 9.0 credits

Total Credits - 15.0
Second Level (Years 3 and 4) Total Credits 61
___________
Total Credits for Degree - 121

*Senior projects carry 3 credits while more formal and in depth academic thesis carries 6 credits. If a student undertakes a 3 credit project, then they will take 12 elective credits. If a student undertakes a 6 credit thesis, they will take 9 credits.

Visit the link below for admissions requirements or to apply online. We look forward to reviewing your applications!
http://www.pratt.edu/admissions/applying/

For more information, please visit our official page at:
http://www.pratt.edu/academics/liberal_arts_and_sciences/critical_visual_studies/

BA Program in Critical & Visual Studies
Department of Social Science & Cultural Studies
School of Liberal Arts & Sciences
Pratt Institute
200 Willoughby Ave.
Brooklyn, N.Y. 11205

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THINKING THROUGH GENRE - NOVEMBER 2 & 3, 2013 PRATT INSTITUTE

Announcement 3:36 PM

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Register for Spring 2014 Sustainability Studies Courses Now

9:59 AM

Pratt Sustainability Studies students canoe the Gowanus Canal.

Pratt Institute students may now register for Spring 2014 courses, and several relating to the Sustainability Studies minor are available. These include courses offered by Interior Design, Math and Sciences, and three courses offered by Social Science and Cultural Studies. Each of these 3-credit courses offered by SSCS may count as a Social Science or Philosophy elective, each count toward the Sustainability Studies minor, and there are no prerequisites for any of them. One of the most important environmental issues is the unsustainable use of fossil fuels. It is worth assessing how we came to do so, and the range of options (including design and behavioral changes) we have to alter our present use of energy. SUST 401-01 Power, Pollution, and Profit examines the types of energy (fossil fuels, renewables, nuclear) used in modern society. Here's a quick summary:

SUST 401-01 Power, Pollution, and Profit Modern society relies on burning fossil fuel for energy, with serious economic, public health, and environmental consequences. Learn the history of how we came to rely on unsustainable energy sources and ways in which our future use of energy may be made mode sustainable. Spring 2014: Tuesdays, 2-4:50pm. Taught by Carl Zimring. 3 credit hours

We are once again offering PHIL 356-01 Environmental Ethics. The seminar examines the traditional ethical approaches humans have taken to the environment and considers alternate, more sustainable approaches. Here's a quick summary:

PHIL 356-01 Environmental Ethics If you can be ethical in relation to others, why can't be ethical in our relations with the environment? This course assesses the capability of traditional ethical paradigms (and their alternatives) to address current environmental issues, including global climate change, food ethics, sustainable consumption practices, and the intrinsic value of non-human nature. Spring 2014: Mondays, 5-7:50pm. Taught by Eric Godoy. 3 credit hours.

In addition to those seminars, Carl Zimring leads a team of Pratt Institute faculty teaching the fourth offering of SUST 201-01 The Sustainable Core. This course is designed as our introduction to sustainability, is a requirement for the Sustainability Studies minor, and is an excellent way to get familiar with the many ways sustainability is practiced at Pratt.

SUST 201-01 The Sustainable Core This course provides an overview of sustainability by exploring definitions, controversies, trends, and case-studies in various systems and locales (urban/rural, local/national/global). Investigation of critical elements of sustainability, including environmental history and urban ecology, sustainable development and landscape transformations, recycling/waste management, ecosystem restoration, and environmental justice. Spring 2014: Mondays, 2-4:50pm. Taught by Carl Zimring with participation by several Pratt Institute faculty. 3 credit hours.

Each of these courses may count as a Social Science or Philosophy elective, each counts for credit in the Sustainability Studies minor, and there are no prerequisites for any of them. If you are a Pratt student and have any questions about these courses, please feel free to contact Professor Zimring at czimring@pratt.edu.

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SSCS Speakers Series presents Claudio Lomnitz "On the origin of the so-called Mexican Race" November 5th, 5:30pm

Announcement 4:08 PM

Department of Social Science & Cultural Studies

Fall 2013 Speakers Series

Presents

Claudio Lomnitz

Campbell Family Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Columbia University

"On the origin of the so-called Mexican Race"

November 5th, 5:30 pm

Dekalb Hall 208 Seminar Room

Claudio Lomnitz
Born in Chile and brought up in Mexico City, Prof. Lomnitz is one of the most distinguished specialists in Mexican area studies in the United States. He has taught at History and Anthropology Departments in El Colegio de México, New York University, the University of Chicago, The New School and, currently, as the Campbell Family Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, where he has also served as Director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race. Recently he completed a year’s residence in Berlin, under the invitation of the Wissenschaftskolleg.

His main books in English focus on nationalist ideologies and the relative position of the Mexican state from the point of view of rural populations, Exits from the Labyrinth: Culture and Ideology in the Mexican National Space; on a renewed view of the same issues of nationalism and people’s notions of their own government, expanded to also look at the view of the state in the work of certain Mexican intellectuals, Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico: An Anthropology of Nationalism; and on the history of the Mexican concept of death from the 1500s to the present, in light of the crisis of Mexico’s “selfness” as it transitions into the late 20^th Century and beyond, Death and the Idea of Mexico. His current research is on anarchist movements just prior to the time of the Mexican Revolution. In addition, he served for many years as Editor in Chief of the journal Public Culture, and has regularly published articles on Mexican culture and politics in La Jornada and Excélsior, two of the main newspapers in Mexico. He coauthored with his brother Alberto, El verdadero Bulnes, a historic drama about two of the key Mexican intellectuals of the late 1800s and their troubled relationship with the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz and with Mexico’s path of modernization without democracy. It won Best Play from the Mexican Drama Award. (Profile by Prof. Ivan Zatz-Diaz)

For more information, please visit our official page

http://www.pratt.edu/academics/liberal_arts_and_sciences/critical_visual_studies/

Pratt Institute Admissions

http://www.pratt.edu/admissions/

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Chiara Bottici - "Imaginal Politics" Social Science and Cultural Studies Speakers Series

Announcement 4:46 PM

Social Science and Cultural Studies Speakers Series

presents

Chiara Bottici

Assistant Professor Philosophy

New School for Social Research

"Imaginal Politics"

Tuesday October 1, 2013, 5:30pm

Seminar Room, Dekalb 208

Chiara Bottici is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York. She is the author of Imaginal Politics, forthcoming from New Directions in Critical Theory Series at Columbia University Press, which explores the link between our capacity to produce images and politics in the current predicament. She also wrote A Philosophy of Political Myth, published by Cambridge University Press in 2007; and Uomini e stati. Percorsi di un'analogia (ETS, 2004), which was translated into English as Men and States (Palgrave, 2009). She is also co-author, with Benoit Challand, of Imagining Europe: Myth, Memory, Identity (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and The Myth of the Clash of Civilizations (Routledge, 2010). With Benoit Challand, she also co-edited a collection of essays entitled The Politics of Imagination (Routledge, 2011).

IMAGINAL POLITICS

How can we explain the paradox of a political world full of images but increasingly deprived of imagination understood as the radical capacity to begin something new? By developing the concept of imaginal, understood as an intermediate space between imagination and the imaginary, I will explore the imaginal nature of politics as well as that of its contemporary transformations. Whereas imagination is a faculty that we possess and the imaginary is a domain that possesses us, the imaginal, understood as what is made of images, of (re)presentations that are presences in themselves, is not the sign of a lack, but rather of an abundance. Yet, the exponential quantitative increase in the number of images that mediate our political world, has now produced a new quality, a change in the intimate nature of politics itself, which is increasingly reduced to an empty spectacle. Together with the spectacularisation of politics, comes its increasing virtualization, as images, in the contemporary epoch, are no longer objects given once for all, but rather processes. Although the revolution of the new individual media can perhaps open new roads towards a democratization of the image, a different scenario is disclosed by the current biopolitical turn: that of a global society of the spectacle where the cloned image is no longer what mediates our political life, but rather what risks doing politics in our stead.

For more information, please visit our official page

http://www.pratt.edu/academics/liberal_arts_and_sciences/critical_visual_studies/

Pratt Institute Admissions

http://www.pratt.edu/admissions/

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Department of Social Science & Cultural Studies - Fall 2013 Speakers Series Schedule

Department of Social Science & Cultural Studies 9:42 PM

Chiara Bottici

Assistant Professor Philosophy, New School for Social Research

October 1st

Title of Talk: "Imaginal Politics"

5:30

Dekalb 208 Seminar Room

Bio: Chiara Bottici is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York. She is the author of Imaginal Politics, forthcoming from New Directions in Critical Theory Series at Columbia University Press, which explores the link between our capacity to produce images and politics in the current predicament. She also wrote A Philosophy of Political Myth, published by Cambridge University Press in 2007; and Uomini e stati. Percorsi di un'analogia (ETS, 2004), which was translated into English as Men and States (Palgrave, 2009). She is also co-author, with Benoit Challand, of Imagining Europe: Myth, Memory, Identity (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and The Myth of the Clash of Civilizations (Routledge, 2010). With Benoit Challand, she also co-edited a collection of essays entitled The Politics of Imagination (Routledge, 2011).

Sam Moyn

Professor of History, Columbia University

October 15th

Title of Talk: "Thinking about Human Rights History"

5:30 pm

Dekalb 208 Seminar Room

Bio: Samuel Moyn teaches history at Columbia University. His most recent book is "The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History' (Harvard, 2010).

Claudio Lomnitz

Cambell Family Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Columbia University

November 5th

Title of Talk: "On the origin of the so-called Mexican Race"

5:30 pm

Dekalb 208 Seminar Room

Bio: Claudio Lomnitz works on culture and politics in Mexico and the Americas. His books include include Evolución de una sociedad rural (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1982); Exits from the Labyrinth: Culture and Ideology in Mexican National Space (University of California Press, 1992); Modernidad Indiana: nación y mediación en México (Planeta, 1999); Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico: An Anthropology of Nationalism (University of Minnesota Press, 2001); Death and the Idea of Mexico (Zone Books, 2005); El antisemitismo y la ideología de la Revolución Mexicana (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2010) and, with Friedrich Katz, Una conversación sobre México, su revolución y su historia (Edicioines Era, 2011). His most recent book, The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón is currently in press with Zone Books.

Lomnitz is also the author of a number of journalistic essays, and writes a bi-monthly column for the Mexico City newspaper La Jornada. He also wrote an historical play that received Mexico’s National Drama Award. Lomnitz served a 6-year term as editor of the journal Public Culture, and is currently co-editor of the books series Umbrales published by Fondo de Cultura Económica. Claudio Lomnitz is the Campbell Family Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University and was a Fellow at the Wissenchaftskolleg zu Berlin for 2011-12.

Susie Linfield

Director of Cultural Reporting and Criticism at the

Aurthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, New York University

Title of Talk: "What is the Image We're Looking For? Depictions of Race and Class in American Journalism and Photojournalism"

November, 21st

5:00 pm

Engineering Building Room 307

Susie Linfield is the author of The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism and has been translated into Italian and Turkish. She is an associate professor in the journalism department at New York University, where she directs the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program. Linfield writes about politics and culture for an array of publications including the Nation, the Washington Post Book World, Aperture, Dissent, the New Republic, the Boston Review, and Guernica.

John Rajchman

Adjunct Professor of Theory and Criticism, 20th Century Art and Philosophy

Columbia University

Title of Talk: "What is a Creative Act?"

December 3rd

5:00 pm

Dekalb Seminar Room 208

Bio: John Rajchman is an Adjunct Professor and Director of Modern Art M.A. Programs in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. He has previously taught at Princeton University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Collège International de Philosophie in Paris, and The Cooper Union, among others.

He is a Contributing Editor for Artforum and is on the board of Critical Space. Prof. Rajchman's works include: Michel Foucault: The Freedom of Philosophy (1985); Post-analytic Philosophy (1985) editor with Cornel West; Philosophical Events: Essays of the '80s (1991); Truth and Eros, Foucault, Lacan and the Question of Ethics (1991); The Identity in Question (1995) editor; Constructions (Writing Architecture) (1998); The Deleuze Connections (2000); Rendre la terre légère (2005); French Philosophy Since 1945: Problems, Concepts, Inventions (2011) editor with Etienne Balibar.

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Canoeing Brooklyn's Most Infamous Sink: SUST 405 Tours the Gowanus Canal

6:51 PM

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Jazz Right Now -- Prof. Cisco Bradley's new blog on NYC's Improvised Jazz Scene

Announcement 4:34 PM

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"Sustaining Cultural Development" with Biljana Mickov, Sept. 25, 6:30-8pm

Cultural Studies 2:39 PM

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The Individual and the West: A Discussion

Announcement 12:25 PM

The Individual and the West:

A Discussion

with

John Lobell

(Architecture)

and

Suzanne Verderber

(Humanities and Media Studies)

Tuesday, September 17, 12:30 to 2:00

Alumni Reading Room, Library,

Pratt Brooklyn Campus

In the West we have seen the emergence of “the individual” in a form seen nowhere else. Why did this occur, and what is this individual?

Join us for two presentations that approach this question in contrasting ways, and then please participate in a discussion. Lobell will argue in favor of the Western individualism as a form of subjectivity that promotes moral action, whereas Verderber will propose that individualism itself is a subjective formation sustained by specific arrangements of power.

LOBELL’S PRESENTATION:

Moral Agency

Cultures are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. In the West, these story can be seen in the Arthurian Romances, in Huck Finn, and in just about every action movie, all placing moral agency in the heart of each individual.

About Lobell:

M. Arch., University of Pennsylvania, Thesis on Architecture and Structures of Consciousness • M. Arch., University of Pennsylvania, professional degree

B.A., University of Pennsylvania

Current projects: Timeship, extreme life extension (Timeship.org); myths and movies (CinemaDiscourse.com); Visionary Creativity (CulturalDiscourse.com). More at JohnLobell.com.

VERDERBER’S PRESENTATION:

The Medieval Fold: Power, Repression, and the Emergence of the Individual

Medievalists who study the West have grappled with a curious phenomenon, what has been spoken of as the apparent emergence of the individual during the twelfth century. In this presentation, I argue that the inquiry into the emergence of the individual during the twelfth-century has been hindered by reliance upon a model of the subject that is too rigid, based upon the establishment of a boundary between the interior self and the external world, and propose a new theoretical model, that of the folded subject, which allows for a nuanced understanding of how interactions between institutions, power, and the unconscious resulted in the production of the internalized, individuated subject.

About Verderber:

B.A., Dartmouth College; Female Agency in the Social Fictions of Marguerite de Navarre

Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania; Subjective Vision and Fragmentation in Late Medieval France, Burgundy, and Flanders

Current project: Perspective and the Emergence of the Humanist Subject

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Prof. May Joseph's Harmattan Theater in a performance of "Far Rockaway"

Faculty and Student Work 8:30 PM

September 14, 2pm, at Rockaway Park, Beach 116.

FAR ROCKAWAY

Hurricane Sandy destroyed much of New York’s coastline. Many communities continue to reel from the after shock of the unprecedented storm surge. Harmattan’s performance Far Rockaway is a communal reclamation of a neighborhood vulnerable to the sea.

Directed by

May Joseph

SITE INFO: MEET AT F LIGHT 587 PARK MEMORIAL AT 12
NOON. FREE AND OPEN TO PUBLIC.

May Joseph
(Artistic Director of the Harmattan Theater and Professor of Social Science & Cultural Studies)
Tanzanian born Joseph is the Founder of the environmental collective Harmattan Theater. Joseph has dramaturged and directed Harmattan’s site specific outdoor productions, exploring the history of New York City through architecture, design and environmentalism. Islands, the Hudson River, riverscapes, ocean currents, sea walls, buried rivers, wetlands, bridges, and the impact of water across global urban environments are Joseph’s areas of interest. Joseph has created large scale public performances on Governors Island, numerous piers in Manhattan including Christopher Street, as well as along Fourteenth Street in Manhattan. Joseph’s artistic work includes cities in India, where she made a short film about the Yamuna River in Delhi, and is working on a site specific performance along the Fort Cochin seawall.
Joseph trained in Directing and Playwrighting at U.C. Santa Barbara’s Department of Theatre and Dance where she received a PhD in Theater. Joseph’s directorial interests lie in bringing together ritual, movement, mime, voice, images and text into dialogue with shorelines, rivers and cities. Trained as a Bharata Natyam dancer, Joseph’s work draws upon the Indian environmental dance theater traditions of the Jatra, Chautu Nadagam and Indian street theater movements, Kalaripayyati, Kathakali, Kyogen and the experimental techniques of Arianne Mnouchkine and Christo. Joseph is the author of Nomadic Identities and Co-Editor of Performing Hybridity, City Corps, Body Work and New Hybrid Identities. She teaches theater, film and visual culture at Pratt Institute, New York. www.mayjoseph.com

For more information, please visit our official page

http://www.pratt.edu/academics/liberal_arts_and_sciences/critical_visual_studies/

Pratt Institute Admissions

http://www.pratt.edu/admissions/

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Prof. Uzma Rizvi reflects on her passion for Archaeology

Anthropology 1:54 PM

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Pages

Our Program of Study: Revised Curriculum Beginning Fall 2014!

THINKING THROUGH GENRE - NOVEMBER 2 & 3, 2013 PRATT INSTITUTE

Register for Spring 2014 Sustainability Studies Courses Now

SSCS Speakers Series presents Claudio Lomnitz "On the origin of the so-called Mexican Race" November 5th, 5:30pm

Chiara Bottici - "Imaginal Politics" Social Science and Cultural Studies Speakers Series

Department of Social Science & Cultural Studies - Fall 2013 Speakers Series Schedule

Canoeing Brooklyn's Most Infamous Sink: SUST 405 Tours the Gowanus Canal

Jazz Right Now -- Prof. Cisco Bradley's new blog on NYC's Improvised Jazz Scene

"Sustaining Cultural Development" with Biljana Mickov, Sept. 25, 6:30-8pm

The Individual and the West: A Discussion

Prof. May Joseph's Harmattan Theater in a performance of "Far Rockaway"

Prof. Uzma Rizvi reflects on her passion for Archaeology

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